zaterdag 12 oktober 2013

Living the Orwellian Life

Sixty-five years ago today, in a remote part of Great Britain, George Orwell was finishing his prescient novel, 1984. At the same moment a continent away in Hollywood, an American woman was actually living Orwell's fictional story. In the fall of 1948, actress Dorothy Comingore of Citizen Kane fame had no clue that the U.S. "thought police" was spying on her, but she could feel a shadow dogging her steps. Dorothy couldn't find a job to save her life and grew so upset about her difficulties, she wondered aloud: "If I've done something wrong, I'd like to know what it is."

It was as if the moody, random terror that Orwell had so vividly created in his manuscript had drifted across the Atlantic and slipped onto a westbound train for California. Unbeknown to Dorothy, she was being tailed by federal agents, monitored by Congressional investigators, and ranked as dangerous on a top-secret "security" list. These facts seemed more ludicrous than Orwell's parody of a "security state." But America already was constructing it.

Today, many U.S. writers, artists and activists undergo similar surreal experiences thanks to the National Security Agency (NSA). While we may think that our government's scrutiny of our private lives is somehow new and shocking, it isn't. America has a tradition of spying on its own. I realized this recently when I picked up my yellowed copy of Orwell's classic after reviewing Dorothy's private papers. I was struck by the parallels between Orwell's imagination, his real-life contemporary in America and what's happening to us today. Covert surveillance, travel restrictions, detentions, loss of work and worse. ... This is what happens to Americans who think differently than those in power.

This is what's happening now.

To understand the beauty of - and potential punishment for - independent thought, let's go to postwar Britain, a cold and dreary place. To finish his novel about "The Ministry of Truth," Orwell felt that he had to go to an even darker place. In late 1948, he lived on the Scottish isle of Jura, a remote and barren scratch of Hebridean rock. With little more than a camp bed and a table, the author used his "natural hatred of authority" to write a satirical fantasy about a totalitarian world. In it, eternal warfare is the price for a bleak prosperity. The "Party" remains in power by controlling the people. Giant telescreens scan the actions of everyone, disembodied voices deliver "newspeak" to the masses, and citizens are bombarded with nonsensical slogans such as "Freedom is Slavery" and "Ignorance is Strength." (Sound familiar?)

In 1984, the Party prohibits any display of individuality, and the worst crime is thinking for oneself. Yet, before long, two lovers, Winston Smith and Julia, begin to do just that. They try to evade the thought police by joining the underground opposition. But the Party finds them, turns one against the other, and tortures Winston until his spirit finally breaks.

When Orwell's book was published, it was called a fantasy. But it served as a warning to Americans such as Comingore. The fiery actress had become famous for starring inCitizen Kane (1941). She portrayed Susan Kane, the mistress of industrialist Charles Foster Kane, who was based on media tycoon William Randolph Hearst. She had rendered the mogul's paramour with such skill and vulnerability that she was rumored to be short-listed for an Academy Award. She already had won the hearts of millions of moviegoers, according to Variety readers' polls, and her gorgeous face graced the pages of Life, Look and dozens of other publications. In the 1940s, Dorothy was a star with a promising career, the admiration of peers, a fine marriage and two children.

The star also had acquired a powerful enemy - the 78-year-old Hearst. The media mogul so hated Dorothy's portrayal of his mistress, 44-year-old Marion Davies, that he used his chain of newspapers and radio stations to smear the young woman. Hearst's columnists Hedda Hopper and Walter Winchell publicly accused Dorothy of belonging to the "Party," in this case the Communist Party, and borrowed Orwellian "newspeak" to malign her. As it was, Dorothy never was a dues-paying "commie." But even if she had been, it was her constitutional right to be one. She did associate with screenwriters who were communists or had been at one time: Budd Schulberg (On the Waterfront), Dorothy Parker (A Star Is Born) and dear friends Cleo and Dalton Trumbo (Spartacus). These people were called to testify about their beliefs in front of America's ersatz Ministry of Truth - the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). Publicly, union members and artists had to convince the HUAC that their "incorrect" affiliations and thoughts no longer existed - or if they did, they were not dangerous to the state.

Orwell would have loved the irony of it all.

U.S. political leaders at the time distrusted labor organizers and free thinkers even if those thinkers had raised money for the war and its victims, as Dorothy had. The FBI began tailing the actress. According to her files, agents reported her attending parties with Russian guests and giving speeches that, among other things, praised Soviet painters for their realism. But her biggest sins were working alongside black musician Leadbelly and singer Paul Robeson to try and desegregate USO clubs (they did), canvassing voters in Watts for state Assembly candidate Albert Dekker (who won) and trying to overturn the judicial lynching of Mexican youths in the corrupt Sleepy Lagoon Murder Trial (they succeeded).

Dorothy's triumphs embarrassed the status quo.

Agents began collecting all of Dorothy's stage names, addresses and names of relatives and traveling companions. Officials tapped her telephone, opened her mail, and went so far as to ransack her tiny apartment. By then the actress was blacklisted and divorced, struggling to raise her children. It's no wonder she descended into depression, alcoholism and a few nervous breakdowns.

Still, the FBI didn't let up. Director J. Edgar Hoover had added Dorothy to his secret expansive "Security Index." He'd devised a system of writing the names of "subversive" citizens on white index cards and ranking them according to how far that person's beliefs strayed from what Hoover considered acceptable. It was easy to get on the list; it was impossible to get off. Dorothy was ranked a "Category C" danger, which meant that in the event of war she could be hauled off to an interment camp. As absurd as that sounds, the U.S. in mid-1950 was fighting the Korean War and, under Hoover's plan, Dorothy and some 12,000 other "potentially dangerous" dissidents were about to be arrested and detained in prison camps. Fortunately, President Harry Truman considered the plan unconstitutional and vetoed it.

The alleged purpose of this giant stakeout is not to stamp out "communism" but to quash "terrorism." But these efforts edge perilously close to punishing "thought crimes," too. The only difference is that, unlike Orwell's telescreens or Hoover's binoculars, individuals (not the Party) pay for the new spy tools by purchasing big-screen computers, private smartphones and the latest high-tech gadget.

Of course, we wouldn't know any of this without the painstaking work of documentary filmmaker Laura Poitras, American journalist Glenn Greenwald and their source Edward Snowden. Poitras is no stranger to heavy surveillance. She has been harassed by the United States ever since she began filming My Country, My Country, which documents the abuse of American power in Iraq. In 2006, her government began marking her flight tickets with "SSSS" - Secondary Security Screening Selection. This designation is just as mysterious as Dorothy's Category C was 65 years ago, but it too means that Poitras faces extra scrutiny. Authorities have seized her private work papers, her computers, cellphones and other equipment, sometimes for weeks at time. They've detained her for hours, interrogating her without specifying why. Poitras has written to members of Congress and submitted multiple Freedom of Information Act requests. But she has never received an explanation as to why she is being hounded.

As Poitras told Salon and The New York Times Magazine, she no longer feels safe in her own country. Incredible as it seems, the woman now lives in Berlin.

Greenwald, too, has long chronicled how the United States has abused its powers and eroded our freedoms; naturally, his views have made him unpopular with US institutions. The author has been smeared as a "communist terrorist," and legislators from both political parties have said he should be prosecuted for revealing our domestic spy program. His past has been dredged up, including his work in defense of the First Amendment rights of neo-Nazis, his work at a gay adult film company (critiques of Greenwld often are drenched in homophobia) and recent financial problems. To stay ahead of spymasters, Greenwald has used encryption software, prepaid phones and track-blockers. But that hasn't gone far enough. Greenwald's spouse recently was detained for nine hours by authorities; officials seized documents he was carrying for Greenwalkd then denied him counsel.

At least Greenwald and Poitras have the protection of shield laws and public notoriety. Unfortunately, ordinary citizens do not. Lately, officials have been detaining a string of women for mysterious reasons. Clay Nikiforuk was stopped for carrying a stash of condoms. Sarah Abdurrahman, a producer for On the Media, was detained by U.S. officials on her way home from Canada. They eventually let Sarah go but never explained why they had detained her. And then there's Michigan resident Mary Scott. She said she received threatening e-mails and was tailed by detectives after she blew the whistle on a health-care company.

The company was fined millions of dollars. Then the government began harassing the whistleblower. Mary and her daughter were placed on a TSA watch list; they've been pulled out of airline boarding lines and detained. According to court documents, Mary also has been denied some basic legal remedies. In fact, when a judge in North Carolina heard about the actions that the U.S. government and company had taken against Mary and her family, he was shocked. The official retaliations, he said, "violate everything related to American jurisprudence."

Yet, this happens increasingly in a country where power has grown more secretive and unaccountable in the past 13 years. Americans cherish their basic rights such as privacy, equality and free expression. Yet the fact that those rights are no longer guaranteed to all is a sign of how far we've fallen.

All of which brings us back to Orwell. He didn't think much of the king and queen. But he loved his country and its working people. He was a socialist but in a pragmatic way, hoping that the conditions of the poor and powerless would be improved. But most importantly, he opposed abstractions of every kind: fascism, Communism and nationalism. He recognized that Americanism was a term that easily could be exploited for totalitarian ends.

Obama's Attacks on Journalists are Worst Since Nixon

The Committee to Protect Journalists issues a scathing report on Obama administration.

Photo Credit: AFP

October 11, 2013 |

It's hardly news that the Obama administration is intensely and, in many respects, unprecedentedly hostile toward the news-gathering process. Even the most Obama-friendly journals have warned of what they call"Obama's war on whistleblowers". James Goodale, the former general counsel of the New York Times during its epic fights with the Nixon administration, recently observed that "President Obama wants to criminalize the reporting of national security information" and added: "President Obama will surely pass President Richard Nixon as the worst president ever on issues of national security and press freedom."

Still, a new report released today by the highly respected Committee to Protect Journalists - its first-ever on press freedoms in the US - powerfully underscores just how extreme is the threat to press freedom posed by this administration. Written by former Washington Post executive editor Leonard Downie, Jr., the report offers a comprehensive survey of the multiple ways that the Obama presidency has ushered in a paralyzing climate of fear for journalists and sources alike, one that severely threatens the news-gathering process.

The first sentence: "In the Obama administration's Washington, government officials are increasingly afraid to talk to the press." Among the most shameful aspects of the Obama record:

Six government employees, plus two contractors including Edward Snowden, have been subjects of felony criminal prosecutions since 2009 under the 1917 Espionage Act, accused of leaking classified information to the press—compared with a total of three such prosecutions in all previous U.S. administrations. Still more criminal investigations into leaks are under way. Reporters' phone logs and e-mails were secretly subpoenaed and seized by the Justice Department in two of the investigations, and a Fox News reporter was accused in an affidavit for one of those subpoenas of being 'an aider, abettor and/or conspirator' of an indicted leak defendant, exposing him to possible prosecution for doing his job as a journalist. In another leak case, a New York Times reporter has been ordered to testify against a defendant or go to jail."

It goes on to detail how NSA revelations have made journalists and source petrified even to speak with one another for fear they are being surveilled:

'I worry now about calling somebody because the contact can be found out through a check of phone records or e-mails,' said veteran national security journalist R. Jeffrey Smith of the Center for Public Integrity, an influential nonprofit government accountability news organization in Washington. 'It leaves a digital trail that makes it easier for the government to monitor those contacts,' he said."

It quotes New York Times national security reporter Scott Shane as saying that sources are "scared to death." It quotes New York Times reporter David Sanger as saying that "this is the most closed, control freak administration I've ever covered." And it notes that New York Times public editor Margaret Sullivan previously wrote that "it's turning out to be the administration of unprecedented secrecy and unprecedented attacks on a free press."

Based on all this, Downie himself concludes:

The administration's war on leaks and other efforts to control information are the most aggressive I've seen since the Nixon administration, when I was one of the editors involved in The Washington Post's investigation of Watergate. The 30 experienced Washington journalists at a variety of news organizations whom I interviewed for this report could not remember any precedent."

And this pernicious dynamic extends far beyond national security: "Ellen Weiss, Washington bureau chief for E.W. Scripps newspapers and stations, said 'the Obama administration is far worse than the Bush administration' in trying to thwart accountability reporting about government agencies." It identifies at least a dozen other long-time journalists making similar observations.

The report ends by noting the glaring irony that Obama aggressively campaigned on a pledge to usher in The Most Transparent Administration Ever™. Instead, as the New Yorker's investigative reporter Jane Mayer recently said about the Obama administration's attacks: "It's a huge impediment to reporting, and so chilling isn't quite strong enough, it's more like freezing the whole process into a standstill."

Back in 2006, back when Iwas writing frequently about the Bush administration's attacks on press freedom, the focus was on mere threats to take some of these actions, and that caused severe anger from vocal progressives. Now, as this new report documents, we have moved well beyond the realm of mere threats into undeniable reality, and the silence is as deafening as the danger is pronounced.

Related matter

Along with David Miranda, I testified yesterday before a Committee of the Brazilian Senate investigating NSA spying, and beyond our latest revelations about economic spying aimed at Brazil, one of the issues discussed was the war on press freedoms being waged by the US and UK governments to prevent reporting of these stories. The Guardian, via Reuters, has a two-minute videowith an excerpt of my testimony on that issue.

The United States military plans to occupy all of Pagan Island for live-fire training exercises, including bombings. This doesn't just ignore the rights of indigenous Pagan Islanders. It could also disturb the ecologically valuable topsoil, increase the chances for summer fires, erode or destroy the coral reefs surrounding the island, and taint the entire island with toxins for decades.

And Pagan Island's thousands of flora and fauna, including its rare birds, bats, and insects, could be killed off forever.

William
Pitt the Elder, Earl of Chatham and British Prime Minister from 1766 to 1778, said
something similar in a speech to the UK House of Lords in 1770:

‘Unlimited power is apt to corrupt the
minds of those who possess it.’

Acton is likely to have taken his lead
from the writings of the French republican poet and politician, again a
generously titled individual - Alphonse
Marie Louis de Prat de Lamartine. An English translation of Lamartine's
essay France and England: a Vision of
the Future was published in London in 1848 and included this text:

It is not only the slave or serf who is
ameliorated in becoming free... the master himself did not gain less in every
point of view... for absolute power corrupts the best natures.

the neo-liberal model has also resulted in an
unprecedented worldwide polarization. Fierce social and class struggles
worldwide were able in the 20th century to impose a measure of
social control over capital. Popular classes, to varying degrees, were able to
force the system to link what we call social reproduction to capital accumulation.
What has taken place through globalisation is the severing of the logic of
accumulation from that of social reproduction, resulting in an unprecedented
growth of social inequality and intensified crises of survival for billions of
people around the world.

The
American Dream of upward mobility is dead, thanks to the neoliberal
ministrations of capital and government. But a new dream could rise from the
mess left by globalization, off-shoring and austerity.

The continuation of the economic crisis of 2008 up to
the present has driven home a social trend that has been evident since the late
1970s, the decline of what is usually called ‘the middle class’ and the
accompanying American Dream.

The pauperising effects unleashed by globalisation
have generated social conflicts and political crises that the system is now
finding it more and more difficult to contain. The slogan ‘we are the 99 per
cent’ grows out of the reality that global inequalities and pauperisation have
intensified enormously since capitalist globalisation took off in the 1980s.
Broad swaths of humanity have experienced absolute downward mobility in recent
decades. Even the IMF was forced to admit in a 2000 report that ‘in recent
decades, nearly one-fifth of the world’s population has regressed. This is
arguably one of the greatest economic failures of the 20th century’.

Global
social polarisation intensifies the chronic problem of over-accumulation. This
refers to the concentration of wealth in fewer and fewer hands, so that the
global market is unable to absorb world output and the system stagnates.
Transnational capitalists find it more and more difficult to unload their
bloated and expanding mass of surplus - they can’t find outlets to invest their
money in order to generate new profits; hence the system enters into recession
or worse. In recent years, the Transnational Capitalist Class has turned to
militarised accumulation, to wild financial speculation, and to the raiding of
sacking of public finance to sustain profit-making in the face of
over-accumulation.

the uniformly superficial nature of the
analysis of its causespresented by mainstream observers, whether
government officials, academics or business representatives. This applies very
much to journalists too, not least the liberal media.

Thus it is commonly stated that the crisis was
caused by a combination of imprudent investment by bankers and others… and
unduly lax official regulation and supervision of markets. Yet the obvious
question begged by such explanations – of how or why such a dysfunctional climate came to be created – is never
addressed in any serious fashion.

Sooner or later, Mr. Bush argued, sanctions
would force Mr. Hussein's generals to bring him down, and then Washington would
have the best of all worlds: an iron-fisted Iraqi junta without Saddam Hussein.

The hidden hand of the market will never work
without a hidden fist. McDonald's cannot flourish without McDonnell Douglas,
the designer of the F-15. And the hidden fist that keeps the world safe for
Silicon Valley's technologies to flourish is called the US Army, Air Force,
Navy and Marine Corps.

The Lexus and the Olive Tree: Understanding
Globalization. May 2, 2000.

En:

We needed to go over there, basically,
and take out a very big stick right in the heart of that world and burst that
bubble.… What they [Muslims] needed to see was American boys and girls going
house to house from Basra to Baghdad and basically saying ‘Which part of this
sentence don't you understand? You don't think we care about our open society?
You think this bubble fantasy, we're just going to let it grow? Well, suck on
this!’ That, Charlie, is what this war was about. We could have hit Saudi
Arabia! It was part of that bubble. We could have hit Pakistan. We hit Iraq
because we could.

I was speaking out in Minnesota — my hometown,
in fact — and a guy stood up in the audience, said, ‘Mr. Friedman, is there any
free trade agreement you’d oppose?’ I said, ‘No, absolutely not.’ I said, ‘You
know what, sir? I wrote a column supporting the CAFTA, the Caribbean Free Trade
initiative. I didn’t even know what was in it. I just knew two words: free
trade.’

Meet the Press
(23 July 2006), referring to the Central
American Free Trade Agreement.